Copulus

Copulus - the love making and weight lifting simulator / god game is a 2D tile-based game, designed around the limitations of a NDS screen, in which the player assumes the role of a God. He must train and provide food for his warriors, in order to make them stronger, and more attractive. The goal of the game is to raise the tribe's population to the maximum (50), in order to send them to connect and populate other worlds.

Mini Tutorial:
Hunt: You summon a pack of wolves (4 + nrOfSummons) that can be devoured by your followers. Note that wolves will attack and engage them. Killing a wolf fills the individual's hunger bar and awards XP.
Train: Your followers begin lifting weights to gain XP and increase their level (and damage / defense). While training the hunger bar depletes faster.
Idle: Your followers roam around the island and engage in social activity, in search of a mate. If a mate has been found visual indication (in the form of a heart) will appear above their heads. While in the idle mode, hunger depletes slowly and Health is regenerated.

Goal: reach 50 individuals in your tribe.
Loose: if you have less then 2 individuals (since you know, 0 or 1 cannot pro-create).

The hunger bar is the yellow one on the left side of a follower. Health bar is the red one over their head. The number to the right represents the level.

The game requires you to manage and switch between summoning wolves, training (to defeat stronger wolves) and "copulating" to increase your tribe's population.

Currently (24-08-2014) only the windows build is available (it includes the source code). I will submit a Linux and Mac OSX (and maybe android) tomorrow (been up for 43h, and I gotta go to work in the morning). The source code and assets are made available under the MIT license. Feel free to use them how ever you see fit.

I will write a post-mortem on my experience with building a bare-minimum god-game tomorrow evening, including how helpful it was to have a WIKI as a notebook. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or poke me on twitter (@Zapakitul)

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If you are wondering why the game has that art style or (upscaled) low resolution graphics, here are the limitations I set for myself at the beginning of this challenge:
Self-Imposed Limitations:

First Pass:
- select a random tile on the map
- move around the tile in a clock wise rotation (spiral) and mark random tiles in your path as grass tiles
- the more grass neighbors a tile has, the more chances to become a grass tile
- repeat this process <mapWidth/2> times

Second Pass:
- loop through the entire map again and check for single grass tiles (separated from the land-mass)
- remove all (or mostly all) stray grass tiles

Third Pass:
- loop through the map and place trees and mountains on grass regions that have grass neighbors. Bonus points if you can center the trees/bushes around the center of an island
- finally, check to see if a grass tile has a water tile beneath it. If so, replace the water tile with a transition tile between grass and water.

There are a few more in-depth articles that cover a similar usage if you search for island procedural generation on google.

The idle mode was sort of uninteresting for me, it just seemed like a lot of waiting and my population seemed to increase anyway although maybe not quickly? At least I think it would help being able to see some progress in the idle state?

I found a bug where a member would get stuck in hunt mode and not being able to attack. Might happen just on the portals?

Also when a new member was born they would always be too weak and get eaten as soon as I hunt. No matter how much I trained.

That was unbelievably hard! I did better when I started off training them half to death then hunting, but I never managed to beat it. Great job though, I'm really impressed that you managed this in 48 hours!

Boy, I cannot get these goblins to live, even when it spawns a bunch of them for me. I can't seem to see any health indicators on wolves, so I can't tell whether my people are hitting them or not, and sometimes I get goblins that just don't fight or wander off into the corner of the map and starve. It makes me wish I had some kind of rally point to send them all to, and/or gather and share food so that one strong goblin doesn't keep killing and eating all the wolves before the others can get there.

Nice Idea, though i did not really manage to create a tribe with enough people. I think this could work great as a tamagotchi for grown ups.
Sound would have been nice.

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